Project 3-Codes

 Libby Williams, Mark Baptista, & Dominic Muren

In this project, our goal is to produce an interactive activity which will educate 6th grade children about the life and work of  Hedy Lamarr, and in particular, how codes are made and decrypted.  In order to make the activity engaging, we have decided on a few things which must occur:

• The activity must include NO lecturing

• Any teaching that goes on should be accompanied by a demonstration of the principal involved

• Most of the lesson should be hand-on  in order that the kids don't get bored 

We are now developing the following activities that will be used during and after (in the take-home portion) the presentation.

• A demonstration of spread-spectrum technology, using 4 lengths of garden hose and a rapid-prototyped "jammer".  One child will talk alternately into each of a set of 4 funnels.  The sound will travel through the hose, and then, into the "jammer".  Another child will attempt to jam the sound by lowering a foam baffle into a slot in the tube.  The child will not be able to jam too much of the signal, since the signal keeps moving, and the child has only one foam jammer.  The sound will be heard at the other end by a kid and written down.  It can then be shown that the original message can be re-constructed with relative accuracy.  The same setup will be used again, but only talking through one hose.  This will allow the jammer to jam the entire conversation.

• A de-coding contest.  The children will break into teams.  A code will be shown and partially explained to them, then they will be turned loose to de-code it.  Which ever team finishes first will be named Supreme Code Breaker. A simple Translation Alpha-alpha or alpha-numeric code will be used, since 6th graders do not have the training in probability needed to solve a more difficult code

• Other codes will be discussed-the dancing men cipher, a "mesh" or "sieve" cipher, and  code wheel cipher

• A take-home activity where kids make a code wheel, and other mechanical code mechanisms, such as a spiral cypher

Meeting Information:

        Thursday March 22:
            Discussed:
                -Discussed what we wanted to accomplish with the project
                -Researched different kinds of codes to teach kids
                -Developed Spread-Spectrum demonstration       
           
            To do:
                -Check feasability of different sound transmittors-string, pipe, hose
                -Research more types of fun codes, and think of ways to integrate them into activities